Everyone knows the old bromide about not judging a book by its covers. If it’s true, why do books even have covers? And why doesn’t…
Author
Everyone knows the old bromide about not judging a book by its covers. If it’s true, why do books even have covers? And why doesn’t…
Info-dumps. They are so tempting. It starts with this bunch of stuff that I spent weeks researching. It’s all essential to understanding my story. Readers have…
The other day, I attended a forum sponsored by our local Metropolitan Library for “authors and aspiring authors.” As these things go, it was pretty…
Do believe in ghosts? If so, you’re in good company. According to the Gallup General Social Survey, 37% of Americans believe that houses can be…
Every so often, I have the opportunity to read other authors whose work features LGBTQ characters. Recently, my friend J. Scott Coatsworth sent me his…
I love mysteries, but that’s not what this newsletter is about. Things happen in stories. Characters do things. When we write a story, we reveal who did what–whodunnit. How we reveal that…
Why do readers like genres? Readers like genres because they are familiar. Readers choose a genre because they’ve enjoyed other, similar books. They know more…
Themes? We don’t need no stinking themes. No, John Huston never used that line in one of his movies. But the iconic line about badges…
When we write fiction, we create fictional characters. Hitchcock famously said that the audience cares about the characters, while the plot is there to give…
A colleague of mine recently got a response from an editor praising his story for being “almost metatextual.” He wondered what that meant. I wondered, too. So,…